Poetry

As a child, as little more than an infant still learning numbers and words, I went to sleep after praying for uncles and aunts, for the living and the dead, with one hand in my mother’s hand through the bars of the cot, while I held in the other a bronze statuette of Mary given…

are tentative. Of course. To be an animal is to watch. Is to think about eating all the time. I watch them be so watchful. My window takes them one by one through trees winter strips down to a few species.                              When I saw the deer, I was beginning to type, not it came…

At the bend of the highway just past the beachside melon and papaya stands Past the gated entrance to the Kuilima Hotel on the point where Kubota once loved to fish, The canefields suddenly begin—a soft green ocean of tall grasses And waves of wind rolling through them all the way to the Ko‘olau, a…

I was worn out, lost, and sixteen in China at 6 p.m., everyone suddenly in a purchasing frenzy, when he stopped me with a smile that just turned me upside down: gold caps on one side, gaps on the other. I could tell he was more human than most people, or more kind. He was…

remembering Lem Norrell All those rhetorical contraptions of the metaphysicals prying us loose from the world!                     And those licentious exhortations to squeeze the day! Something about the Anglican burial brought those back, and with them your voice rousing those     metaphors off the page. It’s not like I didn’t get a heads-up, right? But…

Every morning in the hour before you wake, when the sun squares off against the kitchen floor, and the cups from last night still wear necklaces of wine, stoles of milk, I hear waves in the walls. A tide swells from the corner behind the fridge: crest and crash, and that silty forgiveness of sand…

A hairy hand with mouth and eyes,       I would say, and was that scuttling, that side-stepping jig, the furred upper legs bent at the joint in demi-plié, was it       scurry or whisk, romance or menace, this tuft half-hid behind our garden shed door? Her dragline ensnarls like a gossamer kiss       to my thinking, she’s thinking,…

Frederick II of Hohenstaufen, The Art of Falconry 1. Of the oil gland . . . Of the down . . .       Of the numbers and arrangement of feathers in the wing . . . I have seen             on the plains of Apulia how the birds in earliest spring were weak       and scarcely able to…

what it was without growing old a fever a checkup the cold front dragging a rake a plow Pain thinks of something biography a place a word clearing & threshing snow & leaves opening the hour without growing old what it was Pain thinks of something arthritis blindness colloquy of field & figure light what…